Rock scour in Australia: some latest Queensland experiences

Bollaert, E. and Lesleighter, E. and McComber, S. and Bozorgmehr, P. and Fahey, L. and Scriven, D. (2016) Rock scour in Australia: some latest Queensland experiences. In: ICSE 2016 (8th International Conference on Scour and Erosion), 12-15 September 2016, Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

From 2010, a succession of floods in eastern Australia, and particularly in Queensland, brought about spillway operation at high head dams with return periods in the region of Annual Exceedance Probabilities (AEP) of up to 1 in 2,000 years. As such, a number of spillways experienced extensive scour of rock downstream – including Boondooma Dam and Paradise Dam – the subject of the present paper. For both dams, part of the scour assessment process has been to utilise a large-scale physical model to obtain transient data which, together with the detailed geologic assessment, have been incorporated into the numerical scour modelling procedures developed by Dr Erik Bollaert. This paper will first of all describe the features of the 2011 and 2013 flood events at both dams, as well as the resulting rock scour and damage on both spillways and the geology of the rock area below. The paper will then go on to describe the computational scour modelling procedures of calibration and application, used in conjunction with a large-scale physical model of both dam and spillway, demonstrating a “system” approach to spillway scour analysis for plunge pools and similar situations with energy dissipation on natural materials.

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